Susie Helme

Award-winning novelist and editorial consultant

Tag: literature

  • Review: The Epic Women of Homer

    Review: The Epic Women of Homer

    Eirene S. Allen, The Epic Women of Homer: Exploring Women’s Roles in the Iliad and Odyssey (Pen and Sword History 2025)

    https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/219296084-the-epic-women-of-homer

    Homer (whoever he/they were) didn’t just tell the stories of both the Greeks and the Trojans.

    Where most ancient literature barely mentioned slaves, captives or even wives, Homer’s women are fully formed. The grief and heartbreak of the Trojan women is vividly portrayed, and Helen, the captive queen who causes the war, is a complex protagonist. The victim of sexual violence (or was it love?), her fate depends on the outcome of battle between men. Still, she exercises agency, and in her voice is placed the final lament in the Iliad.

    Allen concentrates on precise line by line translation of the Greek, which at first it may seem a bit pedantic to non-Greek readers. I majored in historical linguistics, however, so I find it fascinating. But we must stick through it, otherwise, we miss too much.

    In some translations Telemachus’ scolding Penelope to return to ‘the loom and the distaff’ can sound like teenage misogyny, until we understand that Penelope is Odysseus’ histos, his loom and his mast, a weaving term with connotations of ship-building and of pillars that hold up the rooves of family and dynasty.

    Allen studies women’s roles as queen, captive, goddess or heroine, a structure I found not the most systematic. For example, the same scene of Telemachus scolding his mother is discussed in several different places.

    A woman’s status was defined in relation to the men in her life. The bard implies, though, that the roles are complementary—we couldn’t have had the heroes without the heroines; it is the women who sing the laments, tend the shrines and keep the legends alive.

    What you won’t find anywhere else is the amazing appendix featuring nuanced and insightful discussions on words and phrases (such as histos) within the cultural context of Homer’s age.

    This review first appeared in Historical Novels Review.

  • Review: The Forger’s Ink

    Review: The Forger’s Ink

    Jo Mazelis, The Forger’s Ink (Seren 2025)

    https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/232616443-the-forger-s-ink

    1816 Swansea. It’s October, and the summer has not come.


    Orphaned Fanny Imlay is unloved in the house of her stepfather, who claims she ‘makes a luxury of her melancholy’. She writes of a fantasy world called Summerland where the sun always shines and all the people are happy—all but one girl who believes she was ‘born sad’ and weeps and weeps. The portrait of her mother Mary Wollstonecraft painted by John Opie, which hangs on the wall in the study, is destined never to glance in her direction. When her half-sisters run off with Percy Bysshe Shelley, they do not take her.
    Years later in 1971 Helena is unloved, minding the bookshop while her absent, cruel husband is away. Jude walks in carrying papers she purports to be proof that Fanny did not, as history has written, commit suicide, the tragedy that was the inspiration for Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein.
    Jude, orphaned, has inherited Fisherman’s Cottage, where ghosts come up from the river ‘squelching and dripping, fish-nibbled and green with slimy weeds’. She meets the fun-loving couple Sigi and Olof. Olof teaches her how to make ink from oak galls, and Jude takes up writing again, inspired by the classics. She’s heart-broken when the couple move back to Sweden. She mourns the warmth of the manufactured family she enjoyed for scarce months the way Shelley’s monster watches the happy family with unrequited longing. Like the monster, Jude ‘pass[es] like a wraith through the world’.
    The Gothic tone matches the Wollstonecraft-Shelley subject matter; the pace is languid. It takes Helena over 100 pages to understand what Jude’s papers are (it’s really her husband who knows books).
    Mysterious and beautiful, if heart-rending, it fully explores the emotions of isolation and sadness. We feel the profound melancholy of Fanny and Jude, even Helena.
    This review first appeared in Historical Novels Review.

  • Review: Inspicio

    Review: Inspicio

    D. K. Kristof, Inspicio (Kindle 2025)

    https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/235108672-inspicio

    Survival in a space of absolute loneliness


    Liv wakes to the sound of breathing. She is on Europa, Jupiter’s fourth largest moon. Across from her stands a synthetic woman named Rhea. Rhea keeps her company in the engineering bay, and a little drone follows her ‘like a pale moon’. She remembers the work.
    She tries to figure out the world she is in, but to her every query, Rhea answers, “I am sorry. I do not have a satisfactory answer to that question.” How much can one trust an android?
    We never get the backstory (except a tiny bit at the end), why Liv is here, how this situation came about. But it’s not about that. It’s about her internal experience. How does one survive in a space of absolute loneliness?
    The writing is beautiful, almost poetic. The beauty of the writing alleviates the loneliness. Where The Martian captivated us with technological innovation, this is psychological, even spiritual. Liv is all alone in the—what is it—space station?—all alone in the void. She can’t even be sure of her own mind.